Van Gogh (111 page)

The Road to Tarascon
, J
ULY
1888,
PENCIL AND INK ON PAPER, 9⅞ × 13¼ IN.
(
Illustration credit 30.1
)

In April, in a startling reversal, he set aside his paint box and took up his pencil and pen—the first instruments of his art—as if the years in Paris had never happened. He sent Theo two drawings made according to “a method that I had already tried in Holland some time ago,” he announced. Instead of seeing the stony ruins all around him, or the rocky Alpine heights nearby, his eye lighted on scenes he had seen or drawn a hundred times: a pair of pollard willows, a lone farmhouse standing sentry in a wheat field, a single traveler on a tree-lined road to infinity. Toting his heavy perspective frame through the strange but familiar landscape, he made elaborate drawings, then took them back to his room for his pen to obsess over.

He used the sturdy reeds that he found growing wild on canal banks and roadsides. Cutting their tips at an angle “the way you would a goose quill,” he deployed an astonishing variety of marks—hatchings, dots, and dashes, thin brushlike washes and stark black outlines—closely observing every idiosyncrasy of limb and leaf. In some images he raised the horizon almost to the top of the paper, focusing his gaze not on the Mediterranean sky but on the minute changes in grassy textures of an untended meadow. These were the images that he and Rappard had drawn together on the banks of the Passievaart swamp near Etten; the images that Theo had favored over Vincent’s endless weavers and peasants; the images that had nursed his mother back to health in Nuenen. And they were the only images about which his unforgiving father had ever said a kind word.

Vincent returned again and again to one of these in particular.

In March, in his earliest wanderings around the countryside after the snow melted, he had come upon a familiar sight: a drawbridge. Constructed of huge timbers bleached as white as bone by the relentless sun, it spanned the canal connecting the Rhône to the port of Bouc, about thirty miles southeast of Arles. Vincent had seen similar skeletal contraptions everywhere in cities and towns in the watery matrix of his homeland. Indeed, the dozen or more bridges along the length of the same canal had been built by Dutch engineers to Dutch specifications. Known technically as a double-leaf bascule bridge (after the French
bascule
, for seesaw), it operated as simply as a child’s toy. The timbered trusses, like gateways, on either side of the canal, supported frameworks of heavy beams connected by chains to the roadway “leaves” at one end, and laden with counterweights at the other. So precisely were these weights balanced that a casual heave could throw the whole great lumbered mechanism into motion, opening the way for boats to pass. With a loud creak like a ship docking, the road would split in the middle and rise to perpendicular on each bank, as the long counterweighted arms descended to the ground.

The Réginelle Bridge, spanning the road south from Arles to Port St. Louis on the coast, attracted him especially, even though getting to it from the Hotel Carrel, on the north side of the city, took some effort. He had first stumbled on the bridge in mid-March, just as the weather warmed enough for local women to start washing their clothes on the weedy canal bank nearby. The scene sent Vincent’s imagination drifting backward. Not just the bridge, but the laboring figures echoed the art of his past—before Paris. The wild reeds and neglected waterline evoked the fields and ponds of Nuenen, not the playgrounds of Asnières. Against a bright blue sky, he rendered the bridge and its stone abutments in broken tones of tan and ocher that harked back to the parsonage garden and his father’s Bible. The bridge itself he painted not in the bold color slashes of the
japonaiserie
, but in the painstaking detail of the weavers’ looms. Using his cumbersome perspective frame for the first time since Paris, he recorded every complication of its workings: the reinforced pivots, the ropes and pulleys, the squiggles of draw-chains. Thrust upward on its massive abutments, high above the desiccated canal bank, the jostling peasant women, and the sweep of agitated water, it looms over the familiar landscape as indelibly as the tower over the churchyard where his father was buried.

For the next month, despite the onerous trek, Vincent returned again and again to this landmark of memory, bearing his perspective frame and his draftsman’s pencil. He drew it from both sides of the canal: from the north bank, in front of the house of the
pontier
(bridgekeeper) Langlois, after whom the locals called the bridge; and from the steeper south bank, where the towpath hugged the waterline. He drew it from the west, looking toward the sea, and from the east, against the sunset; from the side, and from straight on, in dramatic foreshortening. With pencil and ruler, he labored like a schoolboy over precise renderings of the bridge’s mechanism. He sent a bold sketch of it to Bernard, along with a description that hints at the long hours he spent lingering in its shadow. He described the “sailors with their sweethearts going up to the town … profiled against the strange silhouette of the drawbridge.”

With every visit, every view, the past loomed larger and larger in his thoughts as well as on his easel. By the end of March, it took only a newspaper obituary of Mauve, enclosed in a letter from his sister Wil, to trigger tears of guilt and regret. “Something—I don’t know what—took hold of me,” Vincent reported, “and brought a lump to my throat.” He had known of his cousin’s death for two months. Only a month before, he had coldly calculated sending Mauve’s grieving widow a painting in order to secure Tersteeg’s attention. But weeks of loneliness and obsessing over the bridge had reopened all the old wounds. Theo’s plan to visit their mother and sisters in Holland on the eve of his thirty-first birthday in May unleashed yet another wave of corrosive memories. Reverting
to the oldest family ritual, Vincent painted a birthday present: an orchard done in “a frenzy of impastos”; and achingly pictured his brother in Holland “seeing the same trees in flower on that very day.”

Vincent fought the flood of reflection with a desperate new plan for vindication. Staring at the paintings and drawings that filled his little hotel room, he began to conceive an image that would put all the ghosts of Holland to rest and reverse his unending exile: a single image that would crown the brothers’ enterprise on the
entresol
, seal his comradeship with fellow avant-garde painters, and finally “convince Tersteeg that I really am a true impressionist of the Petit Boulevard.”

Drawbridge with Lady with Parasol
, M
AY
1888,
INK AND CHALK ON PAPER, 24 × 12⅛ IN.
(
Illustration credit 30.2
)

That image was the Langlois Bridge.

In a “continual fever” of determination, he returned to the familiar canal bank. On a large canvas, secured against the spring mistral, he laid on large areas of color: giant pieces in the simplest of jigsaws. “I want to get colors into it like stained glass windows,” he wrote, echoing the new Cloisonnist gospel of Bernard, “and a good, bold design.” He painted a sandy-white path streaking diagonally across the canvas, bejeweled with passersby in crystals of contrasting color. Under a rectangle of cerulean sky, two great lilac abutments shimmered in a triangle of emerald water. Above them, the bridge loomed in a bold calligraphy
of timbers. On the horizon behind, a huge golden sun radiates its setting glow in stylized waves of white and yellow.

No sooner had he put these pieces together and prepared a sketch for Bernard than the wind and rain drove Vincent indoors, where, in the effort to finish the image from memory, he “completely ruined it,” he lamented to Theo. Undeterred, he tried again and again. In April, when the weather failed to cooperate, he holed up in his hotel room and began a copy of the very first version he had done. But instead of the backward-looking broken tones of March, he filled the familiar outlines with the vivid, prismatic color he had learned on the rue Lepic. He set the canvas ablaze with contrasts: instead of orange-ocher, he painted the earth rusty red. He replaced the rangy canal bank reeds of winter bistre and spring mint with stylized fans of tropical forest green. The rippling water deepened from azure to ultramarine; the stone abutments modulated from gray to lavender; and the bridge itself sprang to life in bright, impossible yellow.

It was a dazzling summary—an image that finally connected his new art to the emotional wellspring of his imagination: the past. He knew immediately that he had created something new and exceptional—“an odd thing,” he called it, “not like what I generally do.”

Fueled now by the same redemptive passion that had driven him to the limits of endurance in the black country and to the brink of suicide in Antwerp, Vincent’s mercenary fervor redoubled. He launched a fantastic scheme to rain his paintings on family and associates in Holland: one for sister Wil, one for his old companion George Hendrik Breitner, two for a museum in The Hague, and, of course, one for the implacable Tersteeg. “He
will
have a picture of mine,” Vincent vowed. And that picture would be the Langlois bridge. “Tersteeg will not refuse that picture,” he promised. “I have made up my mind.” Only that picture could exact “revenge” on the haughty
gérant
for rejecting all the brothers’ previous approaches. Only that picture could set the past right.

In an ecstasy of optimism, he crated it and shipped it to Theo. “It only needs a frame specially designed for it in royal blue and gold,” he wrote—demanding for it the same splendid treatment he had demanded for
The Potato Eaters
. “As far as the Impressionists’ cause is concerned, there is little fear now that we shall not win.”

EVEN AS HIS
art coalesced and his ambitions soared, Vincent’s life resumed its unraveling. For all his mercenary zeal, almost nothing had changed. His endless scheming and elaborate pleading had produced not a single sale. Russell had not bought either of the two paintings (a Monticelli and a Gauguin) that Vincent pressed on him. When Theo sent a selection of “new school” paintings to The Hague in response to Tersteeg’s request for “only those pictures that you yourself
think the best,” he had left out both Bernard and Russell, rejecting Vincent’s advocacy.

His own work had fared no better. Theo’s efforts on the
entresol
had led nowhere. The one collector who had expressed an interest in his work failed to buy anything. The painting that Theo sent to Tersteeg in April was returned unsold in June. A self-portrait he shipped to a London dealer disappeared altogether. The three paintings that were exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants in March and April (two Montmartre landscapes and the still life
Parisian Novels
) narrowly escaped the dustbin when the exhibition closed while Theo was out of town and unable to retrieve them. Vincent had to make hurried arrangements for the young Dutchman Koning (who had moved into the rue Lepic apartment) to rescue them before they were hauled away. Vincent couldn’t even persuade his fellow artists to exchange works with him. Seurat, Pissarro, Russell, Gauguin, Bernard, even the talentless Koning, all passed up opportunities to trade paintings, despite Vincent’s persistent importuning.

If there was a silver lining, it was a tarnished one. At least one reviewer of the Independents’ show, Gustave Kahn, had noticed the two landscapes and the still life by “M. Van Gogh.” It was Vincent’s first critical attention. Regarding the landscapes, Kahn accused the artist of not exercising “a great enough concern for the value and exactitude of his tones.” He described
Parisian Novels
as “a polychromatic multitude of books” and dismissively cast it aside as “a fine motif for a study, perhaps, but not a pretext for a painting.”

As the months passed without a success, either for the brothers’ enterprise or for his art, Vincent sank under the same weight of guilt that had driven him out of Paris. Theo’s money disappeared as quickly and inexplicably in the dusty streets of Arles as in the peat bogs of Drenthe. Contrary to Vincent’s promises, the move to Provence had brought no savings at all. “Worse luck,” he wrote soon after arriving, “I can hardly manage to live any cheaper here than in Paris.” Theo not only sent the same 150 francs every month (at a time when teachers made 75 francs a month), he supplemented that with extravagant supplies of paint and canvas, as well as additional payments when Vincent complained loudly enough about being
“sans le sou.”